Sunday, 3 January 2010

Castmonger #0: Meet My Ears

You don't hear the phrase thrown around so much these days, and for good reason: for all the great things promised by the call to arms that was Web 2.0, what that glorified buzzword actually gave birth to was a bottomless pit of fresh offal discerning readers must now wade through to find the quality resources they seek.

Blogs are great, you won't hear me argue otherwise; a thousand thousand sites with nothing new to add to the conversation springing up dedicated to every subject under the sun - if you ask me, not so much. And with the dawn of the new internet era long gone, it's clear to see that Web 2.0 inflicted much the same sort of molestation on podcasts. Where before there were but a professional few, it's open-mic night now. An innumerable legion of geeks await, ready to dedicate an aural hour to any notion that needs - and I use that word unwisely - exploring.

Of course, the truly good podcasts are still there, it's just gotten infinitely harder to find them. If you can slap your interests in shackles - if they aren't so disparate that there isn't even a name for them, in other words - then surely there's a RSS feed of audio excellence to satisfy you. And quality podcasts on speculative fiction in any medium are as hard to come by as any hour-long explication of frenzied animal fetish.

Enter Castmonger, a semi-regular series of features you'll be seeing a good deal of here at TSS. For your audio enlightenment, Castmonger will conveniently separate the good podcasts from the bad, and those again from the outright ugly. There might be occasional jaunts into other genres and subjects, but being that this blog's business basically boils down to science-fiction and fantasy in film, literature and game form, you'll find Castmonger's strenuous recommendations will lean more often than not towards those subjects in particular.

Contact Details

TSS will gladly accept books, screeners and early builds for potential articles on the blog. Coverage of some sort is likely but not guaranteed. For more information or to request my postal address, email me via this link.